“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” - Stephen King, On Writing
Storified by Carey Applegate · Mon, Nov 19 2012 07:11:54
I love reading.
This is a little cliche for an English teacher to say, right? Of course you love reading. Otherwise, you wouldn't be teaching English.
... but that's not necessarily a natural connection for me since I've spent most of my reading life pushing back against what other people thought that I should be reading. In high school, I mostly trudged through (or SparkNoted) the classics that my teachers assigned. For example:
This is a little cliche for an English teacher to say, right? Of course you love reading. Otherwise, you wouldn't be teaching English.
... but that's not necessarily a natural connection for me since I've spent most of my reading life pushing back against what other people thought that I should be reading. In high school, I mostly trudged through (or SparkNoted) the classics that my teachers assigned. For example:
I was VERY disappointed that this play didn't involve actual witches.
This wasn't nearly as interesting as Crane's poetry...
Ack. And this one wasn't even interesting in the SparkNotes.
But I did read.
I read, easily, at least five books a week outside of school, and burrowing into bed with whichever pop-fiction paperback had caught my eye in my after-school job at a used bookstore became my nightly ritual. At home, I was reading across genres - my favorites were science fiction, romance, horror, and YA novels, all of which allowed me to think through potential realities and my place in the world in interesting ways.
I adored Stephen King's writing; reading about the apocalyptic world portrayed in The Stand made me think about what life would be like if a plague struck "society today." 1200 pages later, I felt like I had a pretty good idea re: how social groups might splinter and what most people would prioritize, but even after I finished reading the book, I'd find myself thinking about some of the issues it raised.
I read, easily, at least five books a week outside of school, and burrowing into bed with whichever pop-fiction paperback had caught my eye in my after-school job at a used bookstore became my nightly ritual. At home, I was reading across genres - my favorites were science fiction, romance, horror, and YA novels, all of which allowed me to think through potential realities and my place in the world in interesting ways.
I adored Stephen King's writing; reading about the apocalyptic world portrayed in The Stand made me think about what life would be like if a plague struck "society today." 1200 pages later, I felt like I had a pretty good idea re: how social groups might splinter and what most people would prioritize, but even after I finished reading the book, I'd find myself thinking about some of the issues it raised.
As I was reading The Stand, I also happened to be taking World History, where we studied the Black Plague. How would it be different from then? I wondered. Would we run to the countryside too? Would we fear our families, our friends? When the novel was adapted into a television miniseries, I learned that I wasn't alone in asking these kinds of questions. All of a sudden, there were other people talking about how the characters were adapting to their new environments and the ways in which the social world in The Stand was evolving.
On the other side of the pop-fiction spectrum, I was re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series; while it was written for children significantly younger than me, I found myself drawn to the characters, to the science, to the faith, and, yes, to the ethics that L'Engle incorporated into the layers of her books. Meg Murray will always be one of my favorite people on the planet, even if it's not MY planet, exactly. Years later, as I read books like Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos or Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, I can still imagine the conversations that Meg, Charles Wallace, and their mother had about tesseracts and how those threads of discussion around what seemed to be an impossibility have shaped my understanding of modern physics.
But A Wrinkle in Time offered more than just physics, more than ethical discussions. It provided a space for reading in which the main character was a girl; not only that, the strongest characters in the book were women. Not like that silly Twilight - or even something more canonical, like The Great Gatsby (in which there were really no positive female characters, not even the yearned-for Daisy). Even today, as I write this, I found myself a little giddy to discover that A Wrinkle in Time has just been adapted into a graphic novel; I'm 35 years old, and all I want to do this Christmas is read this book in front of the fire.
But A Wrinkle in Time offered more than just physics, more than ethical discussions. It provided a space for reading in which the main character was a girl; not only that, the strongest characters in the book were women. Not like that silly Twilight - or even something more canonical, like The Great Gatsby (in which there were really no positive female characters, not even the yearned-for Daisy). Even today, as I write this, I found myself a little giddy to discover that A Wrinkle in Time has just been adapted into a graphic novel; I'm 35 years old, and all I want to do this Christmas is read this book in front of the fire.
The problem with privileging the classics, from 14-year-old Carey's perspective, was that I felt like the thousands of pages I was reading each week didn't count. They didn't count in academics because not only were they not tested, they also weren't discussed; it was like literature had stopped being produced after 1937. And not only did they not count in the classroom, reading them in isolation made me feel like my pop-fiction texts were a dirty little secret. The message that I consistently received from my advanced and AP English teachers was that my books weren't Literature, that they were somehow lower on the literary hierarchy than the Great Works that we were reading for class, and that good readers valued the classics over everything contemporary.
In the middle of all of this positioning of Great Works as the heart of the English classroom, we were doing Very Important Things with our time in the class itself. Symbolism, plot devices, and figurative language were just the tip of the iceberg. Most of our time was spent trying to figure out what the author was trying to do in his book and how these books were either A) reflecting historical culture or B) shaping us into productive members of society. (Grown-up Carey would like to point out that the gendered pronoun used there re: the author was intentional; in four years, we read ONE book written by a woman and ZERO books written by people of color.) Incorporating critical theory and talking about literature through a variety of lenses was not really an acceptable mode of discussion in my very traditional district.
In retrospect, if we absolutely had to study the classics (and only the classics), I wish that somebody in authority had taken a few minutes to break down how and why we read in the first place and to help us make connections between those ideas and the reading that many of us were doing outside of school. In short, I wish that one of my teachers had been John Green.
In the middle of all of this positioning of Great Works as the heart of the English classroom, we were doing Very Important Things with our time in the class itself. Symbolism, plot devices, and figurative language were just the tip of the iceberg. Most of our time was spent trying to figure out what the author was trying to do in his book and how these books were either A) reflecting historical culture or B) shaping us into productive members of society. (Grown-up Carey would like to point out that the gendered pronoun used there re: the author was intentional; in four years, we read ONE book written by a woman and ZERO books written by people of color.) Incorporating critical theory and talking about literature through a variety of lenses was not really an acceptable mode of discussion in my very traditional district.
In retrospect, if we absolutely had to study the classics (and only the classics), I wish that somebody in authority had taken a few minutes to break down how and why we read in the first place and to help us make connections between those ideas and the reading that many of us were doing outside of school. In short, I wish that one of my teachers had been John Green.
But that didn't happen.
What did happen was that I continued to skim my school texts (or, let's be honest, the SparkNotes versions) enough to get a feel for the content. But I rarely made any emotional connections to the books in the way that I connected with The Stand or any of my Madeleine L'Engle books. And since I wasn't engaged with the plots, characters, etc. of the classics that we were drilled on, I sidestepped any driving philosophical questions/social implications that could have been found in the classics. Those books were just part of a checklist of things that I had to do to graduate and move onto the more interesting parts of life. It wasn't until I was in college that I found a space to talk about and analyze the texts that really mattered to me.
20 years later, I wonder what would have happened if I weren't a reader AND a rebel, if I hadn't pushed back enough to prioritize my own reading over the required reading from the school. And I wonder how many of the high-school kids today, sitting in the classics classroom that seems privileged by the Common Core, will ever voluntarily pick up another book after their coursework stops demanding that they read.
What did happen was that I continued to skim my school texts (or, let's be honest, the SparkNotes versions) enough to get a feel for the content. But I rarely made any emotional connections to the books in the way that I connected with The Stand or any of my Madeleine L'Engle books. And since I wasn't engaged with the plots, characters, etc. of the classics that we were drilled on, I sidestepped any driving philosophical questions/social implications that could have been found in the classics. Those books were just part of a checklist of things that I had to do to graduate and move onto the more interesting parts of life. It wasn't until I was in college that I found a space to talk about and analyze the texts that really mattered to me.
20 years later, I wonder what would have happened if I weren't a reader AND a rebel, if I hadn't pushed back enough to prioritize my own reading over the required reading from the school. And I wonder how many of the high-school kids today, sitting in the classics classroom that seems privileged by the Common Core, will ever voluntarily pick up another book after their coursework stops demanding that they read.
